African-Americans in Historical Fiction
The Bondwoman’s Narrative
by Hannah Crafts
A novel written in the 1850s by a runaway slave follows a young slave from a North Carolina plantation as she flees to the North and, after being pursued by slave hunters and forced to serve a difficult new mistress, finally obtains freedom in New Jersey.
Train by Pete Dexter
Quietly navigating his way between his hostile patrons and brutal fellow workers in 1953 Los Angeles, African-American caddy Train finds an unexpected ally in a police detective who encourages Train's ambitions and oversees a case involving a boat hijacking and a beautiful widow.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
An old woman recalls her struggle against bigotry from her childhood during the Civil War to her participation in 20th-century demonstrations.
Sapphire’s Grave by Hilda Gurley-Highgate
Sapphire, born to a woman sold as a slave in 18th-century America, uses her indominable strength and defiant spirit to overcome the poverty and oppression of her life and passes on these qualities to her own descendants.
The Known World by Edward P. Jones
When a plantation proprietor and former slave – now possessing slaves of his own – dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.
Mudbound by Hillary Jordan
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm – a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not – charming, handsome and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion.
Right as Rain by Bev Marshall
Living and working side-by-side on the rural Southern farm belonging to their white employers, Tee Wee and Icey forge a bond based on their shared servitude and their equally painful pasts.
Song Yet Sung by James McBride
A tale set against a backdrop of slave rights conflicts in the 19th-century Chesapeake Bay region finds young runaway Liz Spocott inadvertently inspiring a slave breakout from the attic prison of a notorious slave thief.
Sugar by Bernice McFadden
Set in a small Arkansas town in the 1950s, a tale of loyalty and friendship between two African-American women finds Jude turning to the church after the death of her daughter, and to a young woman who turns out to be a prostitute.
Leaving Cecil Street by Dianne McKinney-Whetstone
Surrounded by block parties that liven up the summer nights of their 1969 Philadelphia home, Joe and Louise find their marriage falling apart, a situation that is complicated by the tragic illegal abortion of their daughter's best friend.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
After the Civil War ends, Sethe longingly recalls the two-year-old daughter whom she killed when threatened with recapture after escaping from slavery 18 years before.
Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas
Celeste Tyree, a young black collegian, leaves Michigan for Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to help found a Freedom School and a voter registration project. Soon she confronts truths about herself and her own family.
Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks
Learning that a company plans to dig up the area where her mother is buried, supposedly with a cache of jewels, Billy Beede, poor and pregnant, heads for Arizona to rescue her mother's body and search for the jewels that could bring her a new life.
Knee Deep in Wonder by April Reynolds
Helene Strickland returns home to the South in 1976 for her aunt's funeral full of unanswered questions about her family and determined to probe the mysteries of her aunt and grandmother.
Cane River by Lalita Tademy
Cane River is an isolated community that lies on a small river in central Louisiana. There in the early 19th century, slaves, free people of color and Creole French planters lived and worked, loved and bore children. The author discovered her amazing heritage there and chronicles four generations of strong, determined black women.
Cotton by Christopher Wilson
Lee Cotton is a black boy born white-skinned in segregated Eureka, Mississippi, in 1950. Over the course of Lee's first 20 years, he will fall in love with the daughter of a local Klansman, get kicked senseless and left for dead on a freight train headed north, end up in St. Louis as a white man, and be drafted into the psych-ops corps in Nevada. There, a drunken accident will separate Lee from another part of his identity and change his fate yet again. Before he returns to Mississippi, he will experience, up-close and personal, the women's liberation movement and the dawn of the Lesbian Nation.